Games With Grey

Stalker 2 rewards and demands patience. The opening is flawed and filled with frustrations, emphasizing obtuse gameplay and unrelenting opposition. GSC Game World’s choices here are both unquestionably eccentric and boldly deliberate. Such deliberateness was bound to earn their work – their spirited labors – derisions and commendations both. Their deliberateness prompted them to craft a video game with many niche mechanics – weapon and armor degradation, encumbrance limitations, hunger and sleep systems – certain to alienate some just as they endear and enchant others; the game is foundationally divisive. But Stalker 2 was not marketed as a niche title, instead receiving ample promotion and support by Microsoft, who made the admirable decision to make the title a day one Game Pass release, greatly bolstering the game’s exposure and illustrating the service’s integralness for Microsoft and their contemporary business practices. The service supplies subscribers with considerable convenience and expands the diversity of readily available experiences, encouraging experimentation by diminishing consumer risk; advantages are many. Even though Stalker 2 is member of a storied and admired franchise, one with a thriving and well-established playerbase and a passionate community of modders, fifteen years have passed since the latest installment, unquestionably diminishing the series’ relevance and meaning that – at least initially – the game’s successes and ultimate fate are intrinsically linked to the Game Pass service, especially on the console side, Stalker intimately intertwined with PC gaming, where the series’ reputation was built and furthered. 

Game Pass Ultimate is not free, and twenty dollars monthly is not insignificant. But that spent twenty dollars entitles the subscriber to play hundreds of titles across all four generations of Xbox consoles and supplies a strange illusion of freeness. While Microsoft’s recent, passionate forays into cloud gaming suggest they see their future fortunes tied to the technology, in the present moment games, actual games, remain a far bigger draw than those still unrefined technologies. Consider Black Ops 6, another day one release and one with far greater widespread appeal than Stalker 2. In making the latest COD available to all Game Pass Ultimate subscribers on launch, Microsoft likely expanded the number of overall subscribers, meaning an expansion of profit, every corporation’s driving desire. These players, revelling in the bombastic Call of Duty experience, might scroll through the Game Pass catalog and catch sight of Stalker 2 (a probable occurrence indeed, considering the game’s heavy promotion and the very nature of the contemporary Xbox dashboard, with its abundance of prominent advertisements, intrusive accompaniments to the player’s efforts at personalization and self-expression). Curious, they might click on the title, read its description and peruse the included screenshots. Recognizing that Stalker 2 is an FPS – and thus superficially similar to Call of Duty – installation is logical and instinctual. They already have access to the service, and so can play GSC Game World’s title with no additional financial investment. Game Pass is working as intended, exposing games and experiences to players who might otherwise not play them. On the surface, all is well.

Once the lengthy installation concludes (Stalker 2 is a massive game with a hefty file size) this hypothetical player might eagerly jump into the fray, into The Zone, the game’s sprawling explorable environment. Perhaps this player finds delight in the experience, noting the game’s willed archaicness, but adjusting to it and compensating for it. More probably, this player will indeed detect the rampant quirks represented in the opening – they are unignorable – but fail in grappling with them, and in turn fail to persevere and recognize the game’s hidden brilliance, the bounteous rewards it affectionately distributes to the devoted. This is a tragic occurrence but a perfectly understandable one. Brilliance shouldn’t be “hidden,” especially not in the modern age, an age which champions instant gratification. Instant gratification’s valorization directly dismantles humankind’s capacity for patience, and ensures that, in this scenario, those Game Pass subscribers who turn to Stalker 2 as a mere curiosity will quit the game entirely after those opening hours of nigh unending frustrations. In their minds, perhaps, nothing was lost, as they tried out the game for “free.” The marketing worked as well as it possibly could in this instance – they installed the game, after all, allocated well over 100 GB of data on their precious SSDs. For this, they should be praised, even as their impatience evinces flaws in the modern condition – and simultaneously the preciousness of time, arguably humankind’s most valuable possession.  

Matters were different in the past, when consumers were essentially forced to invest some direct funds in a purchase, when they were deprived of the illusion of freeness. Whenever consumers feel as though their money is on the line, is in jeopardy of being wasted, then generally they will put in a good faith effort to endure the seemingly unendurable, even in this age of instant gratification. This is why the cinema-goer will sit through, at minimum, 1.5 hours of pure schlock, even if they detect the film’s awfulness from the opening shot. If this viewer leaves the theatre fifteen minutes into the movie, then that viewer will feel duped, as if ten dollars were completely wasted, dollars which might have been spent elsewhere, on more fulfilling experiences and endeavors. And so the viewer sits in agony, in the gloomy dark of the theatre, eventually (and gratefully) leaving the space once the abysmal and nonresonant film has concluded, once the lights have been lit, the projector dimmed. To leave that gloomy dark prematurely would be to acknowledge wastefulness, even if such an abandonment would terminate personal misery and preserve that greatest of luxuries. Money on the line, the viewer sits and suffers in a state of stubbornness, driven by society’s valorization of the dollar.  

In the video game industry, of course, the stakes are far higher, the price of investment greater. Currently, the base version of Stalker 2 retails for sixty dollars on Steam and the Xbox Marketplace, though two other versions are also purchasable, one which sells for eighty dollars, the other going for the exorbitant sum of one hundred-ten dollars. The standard version’s commercial appeal is easily the greatest amongst the three offerings, though certain consumers do exist who will purchase “ultimate editions” driven by the perception that that version is “definitive” and that the other available offerings are inherently “inferior” or incomplete. It is easy and instinctual to deride these consumers, purchasers largely of frivolities and still-unreleased and therefore unassessable content, though in a strange sort of way, their actions are commendable, for they are supporting developers directly, illustrating their (misplaced?) faith in them. Claims of consumer exploitation are not unfounded, of course – the justifications for charging such lofty prices are frequently very flimsy. And yet the practice persists. But whether purchasers of Stalker 2 are the whales corporations so intensely thirst after, or whether they spend the long-accepted-though-finally-changing 60 dollars, they are benefitting GSC Game World in a more intimate fashion, slightly circumventing Microsoft. In buying Stalker 2 on the Xbox Marketplace rather than playing the title through Game Pass, the consumer becomes like that frustrated moviegoer – the consumer becomes more tolerant. Here, though, the consumer is not risking ten dollars, the price of a movie ticket, but is instead risking at minimum sixty dollars, upwards to a possible one hundred ten. Tolerance expands further still, as more money is at risk. It is frustrating to feel as though ten dollars were wasted; when that lost sum is increased sixfold, the frustration is immeasurable.  

Access to Game Pass essentially minimizes these potential frustrations and empowers the consumer – while distorting consumer behavior and expanding the rift between more passive gamers and those who embrace the hobby and the artform wholeheartedly. The service has no doubt contributed to Stalker 2’s considerable successes, introducing the game – and the entire series – to audiences who might otherwise show total disinterest, even as the game belongs to the burgeoning FPS genre. Game Pass fosters curiosity, encourages experimentation. But if a player approaches a video game guided exclusively by curiosity, their overall investment in the product is lesser by far than a player long immersed in said video game from its very announcement, one who has followed all pre-release coverage, read the published previews, consumed the published gameplay videos. These players, these engrossed players, are typically more patient than players who approach a title in a completely oblivious state. For these players have forged a bond with the video game from its very announcement, long before its playability. This bond’s existence fosters perseverance – and simultaneously exacerbates any frustrations felt. Approaching a game with lofty expectations and hopes oftentimes leads to crushing defeats. In this regard, I feel pained for the Stalker veterans, those who have played since Shadow of Chornobyl, who have a far more intimate relationship with the series than I do, and who accordingly delight in its successes more fiercely than I, who feel stings of sorrow I am immune to. Their investment is greater than my own – I am an outsider with Stalker 2. I am one of those driven by my curiosity – and simultaneously the patience that Game Pass and its risk aversion principles overtly destroy. 

Stalker 2 is not instantaneously gripping, is in fact alienating with its eccentricities and admittedly questionable design decisions, flawed balancing foremost amongst them. After the conclusion of a brief tutorial sequence, some further narrative development, and early forays into the Zone, I encountered a Bloodsucker, a chameleonic mutant type with mastery over invisibility and access to devastating melee attacks. In our first showdown, I was woefully underprepared, having access only to puny weaponry in poor maintenance, prone to unpredictable jamming and dramatically lessened lethality. After a few deaths and a few reloaded saves, I prevailed, walking away in a mixed state, feeling not particularly triumphant but more so baffled. It is unfathomably bad game design to present the player with brutal, seemingly insurmountable obstacles even before they have a grasp on fundamental gameplay mechanics. Executing such decisions only causes player disinterest and disgust. Given Stalker 2’s status as a day one Game Pass release, one with no upfront cost for those already subscribed, many players were especially sensitive to this alienation, unwilling to suffer through that which seemed insufferable. 

But this one encounter, flawed as it is, illustrates GSC Game World’s vision, their clarity of vision. More than anything, my eighty hours in Stalker 2 have shown me the game is very much about place, about the crafting of and subsequent inhabiting of a hostile world, one which trivializes humankind. The development studio uses these Bloodsuckers to illustrate human fragility. Rather than creating a power fantasy for the player, making Skif, the player character, some undefeatable, unthreatened god, they chose to make him like other men, favoring relative realism, again emphasizing humankind’s limitations. On paper, this idea sounds impossibly dreary, a dreariness only reinforced by The Zone itself, photorealistic at times to be sure, though still imposing and oppressive. But consider the reality of the situation – I defeated the Bloodsucker, even though I was armed only with the starting pistol, a double barreled shotgun, and the Viper submachine gun. The exchange was ugly and barbaric, certainly, but despite the stacked odds, I did achieve success – and was reminded of mine and Skif’s shared mortality and general helplessness. In this regard, I received intellectual stimulation – as a human I have limitations and will inevitably die – while simultaneously obtaining reassurance, the knowledge that difficult situations can in time be overcome and that humans, for all their fragilities, are not insignificant. Resiliency matters just as patience matters, both in the fictionalized world presented here and in the real world. GSC Game World is thus communicating a message in their work, crafting something memorable, impactful, and lasting, rejecting the thought that games should be tools for escapism and entertainment alone, an archaic thought but one which has endured despite repeated refutations.

Wisely, too, they advance this message by embracing comparatively palatable genres and design philosophies. The FPS genre remains dominant, while open world games have only surged in popularity and prestige in recent memory. Survival horror will always be somewhat more niche, though Stalker 2 is not full blooded survival horror, even as resource management and conservation are of paramount importance, and even as creatures like the Controller inspire genuine dread, a dread only exacerbated by occasionally frightful, eerie environments and environmental storytelling. Still: this is a shooting game at heart, and shooters, particularly first-person shooters, maintain a strange and magical sort of accessibility. Indie games – which run the gamut of genres – have long fixated on thoughtfulness, but they go about this musing in sometimes unapproachable ways, ways which lead to cries of pretentiousness – and consequently unjust dismissal. In no way could Stalker 2 be described as pretentious, even as it poses repeated questions about humanity and about humankind’s place in a dark and despairing world, one which consistently strives to swallow the common individual whole, one which batters the spirit, distorts the mind. This message is subliminal; GSC Game World rejects all vestiges of heavy handedness, even as they developed Stalker 2 amidst a hell, working in a world not far removed from The Zone. Just as I triumphed over that Bloodsucker, they triumphed over their own adversaries and released this game, this bold passion project, one they have not abandoned but have robustly supported post-launch, realizing the potential for improvement and the manifold opportunities for further player stimulation and enrichment; a battle was won but war still rages. 

But do GSC Game World’s efforts here, the substantial patches they have released, the DLC they are no doubt working on, truly matter in the end? Of course they do. Their labors reflect an integrity which is withering away and disappearing from the industry, an industry where products deemed unprofitable are abandoned, salvageability be damned – see the calamitous Concord launch and the subsequent closure of the studio which developed it. One could certainly argue (and absolutely rightly) that studios shouldn’t release games which require such hefty post-launch support, instead postponing release day until the final product is play tested and perfected, but such is the state of the industry. Stalker 2 very much participates in this trend of rocky releases, with the game’s later portions being particularly buggy, but based on the progress already achieved in the roughly two months since release, in one year’s time the game will be a different beast entirely, polished and more engrossing. Late adopters, those who first experience Stalker 2 when it has achieved this refined state closer to the studio’s guiding vision, are sure to be rewarded, though the engagement and delight they will feel cannot possibly match the sensations felt by the truly engaged, those who recognize the game’s inherent greatness and its expandability here and now and who will accordingly cling to the title and participate in its evolution. Tragically, such players are likely the minority, resulting in an underappreciation of GSC Game World’s unusual commitment. First impressions matter, and the curious Game Pass Ultimate subscriber, one who installed this profound game on day one or shortly thereafter and who was frustrated with the experience, whether perturbed by performance instability or gameplay which defies instantaneous understanding but not eventual mastery, will likely never return to see the full effects of the patches and the direct responses to community feedback. Stalker 2 has certainly benefited from Microsoft’s involvement and the Game Pass contract – the potential player base is far larger with the partnership than without it – but alongside those benefits come detriments: the expanded player base has a diminished capacity for patience.